24 Oct

What Doorway Pages?

One of the black hat SEO tricks that put webmasters into trouble and get their sites banned by search engines is doorway pages. Often not many website owners are aware of problems that they can draw upon themselves through the implementation of doorway pages. At one time there were search engine optimization companies were offering it as one of the prided services to set up doorway pages for websites. Doorway pages are looked at with contempt by search engines.
Doorway pages are nothing but pages that are designed in such a way that they are visible only for certain search engine spiders. These pages are often stuffed with keywords and these pages try to trick the search engines in an effort to get better rankings. No real user will be able to view these pages as they are dynamic pages and therefore non static. When a real user happen to reach a doorway page, they will be automatically redirected to a different page of the website. So the intention of the doorway pages is to trick search engines to give better ranking for the respective website.
No search engine allows the practice of using pages that are not meant for the real users either at the frontend or at the backend. The backend pages will be blocked by robots.txt to ensure the spiders don’t crawl them. Where as the doorway pages are specifically developed to attract search engine spiders and only search engine spiders and not real users. These days search engine algorithms are becoming more and more advanced and they are capable of picking up doorway pages and once they pickup such pages, some search engines just ignore them and move ahead with rest of their crawling whereas other search engines will ban the site altogether. In short, doorway pages are considered to be spasm and you certainly would not allow your site to be flagged for this reason. Once your site is flagged then it will affect your company’s reputation. Some unassuming website owners entrust their websites to unscrupulous search engine optimization companies without knowing the harm they could cause to their website. When they see their websites rankings improve fast they celebrate without realizing that the glory is just short lived.
There is no reason for you or your SEO company to use doorway pages to improve your site’s rankings as there are other legitimate ways that are more effective in getting your website better rankings. So such an attempt can never be rationalized or justified. Once your site is banned from the search engines, it will take a long time before you clean up the mess and get back to your original position and meanwhile your competitors who were far behind you would leave you behind and move forward. When it comes to online competition one month is equal one year. so if you are going to take 3 months to bring your site back to its original ranking after the menace then it means that you have lost almost 3 years of your time to the competition.